SUPREME COURT MAKES HARASSMENTS SUITS EASIER
June 20, 2004
Workers who quit because of “intolerable” sexual harassment may sue their employers as though they had been fired— even if they did not formally complain about any abuse, the Supreme Court said on June 14. However, employers may defend themselves against paying damages, the court said, if they can convince a jury that the worker unreasonably ignored the complaint procedure.The decision makes it somewhat easier for victims of alleged harassment to bring their claims in court, according to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle.
In particular, it cleared the way for a jury to hear a sexual harassment suit brought by a woman who quit after working for a few months at a Pennsylvania State Police barracks in McConnellsburg.
Nancy Drew Suders was hired in 1998 as a communications operator and said her three male supervisors subjected her to a “continuous barrage of sexual harassment.”
Suders said she had spoken with an employee who was supposed to take workplace complaints, but she was not offered any help.
After three months on the job, she said, she decided to quit when the three supervisors wrongly accused her of stealing documents from the barracks. She later sued the state police.
A federal judge threw out her complaint prior to trial because she had not formally gone to state police supervisors about the alleged harassment. When she appealed, the US court of appeals in Philadelphia ruled that Suders had in effect been fired and was therefore entitled to win damages from her employer.
Ruling June 14 in Pennsylvania State Police vs. Suders, the Supreme Court gave something to both sides.
For plaintiffs, the court made it easier for employees who quit to win damages as though they had been fired or demoted for rebuffing a supervisor’s sexual advances. Quitting in the face of such abuse is called a “constructive discharge.”
“Under the constructive discharge doctrine, an employee’s reasonable decision to resign because of unendurable working conditions” is treated the same as being fired, said Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in an 8-1 decision. “The inquiry is objective: Did working conditions become so intolerable that a reasonable person in the employee’s position would have felt compelled to resign?”
If the answer is “yes,” employees may take their cases before a jury and win damages as though they had been fired, the court said.
Employers may nonetheless try to prove to the jury that they did everything possible to prevent sexual harassment of their workers. They can seek to show that they had an effective way for employees to report harassment, and that the alleged victim failed to alert the company or the agency about the problem.